The Stalwart Lily Bart and the Traits and Tools of a Coward

_____Of all the things that Lily Bart from House of Mirth may be (temptress, manipulator, spoiled, etc.), a coward is not one of them. A coward is someone who seeks out the easiest way to go through life, and even then they will find a way to expend the least amount of energy in doing so. For example, Lily intentionally botches her chance to marry Percy Gryce, and subsequently into money, just so she can spend time with the man she loves. She can feign surprise at Percy’s sudden urge to flee, but she knew what she was doing. When she let slip a few extra drops of her sleeping medicine, she knew what she was doing. She remembered the chemist’s warning, though she paid it little real thought, and took the one in a hundred chance knowingly (Wharton 342). Though she played with her life and lost, she had as much intention to lose as any time she played bridge or any other game of cards.

_____It’s easy to see why some people may believe that Lily consciously took her own life, or even subconsciously as the text indicates on page 342 (“ –darkness, darkness was what she must have at any cost.”), but that’s a matter of interpretation rather than indisputable fact. It doesn’t make any sense that Lily would force herself to write a check to Gus Trenor, only to not get the satisfaction of showing his pompous assed self that she was nothing if not true to her word. She had been ground to dust, leaving a thin layer of it on the floor of her former social scene, but she wouldn’t be swept away so easily. Killing herself would have made it all too simple for those she once counted as friends to well and truly brush her off their conscience and their shoulders.

_____Going beyond those fair-weather friends, there was also Selden to think about, which she did. As she slowly passed from the cruel waking world to the mercifully benign realm of sleep she remembered that there was something she must tell him. There was a word that would make everything better between them, and it scared her that she might forget it before she woke (Wharton 343). More than the check that had already been written and prepared for delivery, talking to Selden was a vital priority that demanded she wake up in the morning from her drug induced sleep.

_____I can’t say what that word is, and I’m sure even Wharton can’t say without a few grains of salty doubt what it is either, but I will venture a guess and say that it was marriage. With the money allotted to Trenor, and the incriminating letters to Selden burned, Lily had no reason to not accept Selden as her husband. It would no longer be a marriage based on money, but based on love, and if love isn’t a reason to get up in the morning then I shudder to think of how few options there remain to do so.

_____So with self-worth and love on the checklist of why Lily didn’t intentionally kill herself, I present the future for inclusion on that list as well. When Lily visits Nettie Struther’s apartment she sees a life of happiness, despite being in such close proximity to failure and poverty. Witnessing such love and dedication to living stirred something in Lily, and that something was her own resolution to making her own future. That future is shown as the baby Lily holds while she slides into her drug induced sleep. She takes great care to cradle the newborn, “…holding her breath lest a sound should disturb the sleeping child” (Wharton 343).

_____That baby, figurative as it may be, is the new Lily she alludes to on 328. Lily has succeeded in fully creating her new self, and there is no point in making and nurturing that new self if she’s going to kill it off with a few measly drops of soporific. It’s ludicrous to think that Lily Bart knowingly killed herself when she had given herself so many reasons to live. Suicide is a coward’s tool, designed to injure loved ones and escape what was never pursuing. Lily Bart is not a coward and she would never do such a horrible thing to those she loved or to herself. She just wouldn’t.

The Social Network Not-Review

I've just finished watching The Social Network. The credits are rolling at the moment and there's a very soothing kind of ambient music playing as the text rolls by. The credits are over now though, because I checked a few facts on Wikipedia and Google (Mark's birthday and proper italicization (that's a word?) rules respectively) so the following blog entry will be 'correct.'

I'm halfway tempted to play it again from the beginning just so I can have it playing as background noise while I write this, but the menu screen is a few minutes long and is surprisingly conducive to my writing. Anyway. The one thought that popped into my head within the last few minutes of the movie was this, 'This is my generation's Catcher In The Rye.'

Granted, my generation's Catcher In The Rye already is Catcher In The Rye, but The Social Network comes damn close to echoing what makes that story so powerful: I hate this world, but I want to belong.

The Mark Zuckerberg we see in the movie, which isn't the real one, is attending Harvard. He's in an exclusive club with back doors that lead to lucrative and powerful positions all over the world, but that's not what he wants. He just wants to have access to them. To know that should he ever decide to use them, he can. But he can't. They're not listed among his Membership Benefits. He's got a Silver Account instead of a Gold or Platinum. To counter this, he starts his own club and succeeds wildly. He's now the youngest billionaire in history, but he's still the guy who just wants to belong somewhere.

I can relate to that. Not the billionaire thing, but the desperation to feel like I belong. I have friends, and if you scroll down you'll see a lovely piece I wrote about how much they mean to me, but I just feel like it isn't enough sometimes. Of "friends" on Facebook, I have 79 while other's number in the hundreds. There's nothing wrong with that, but that doesn't make me feel any less secure when I think about it. I've been told I'm a great guy, but there's that number staring me in the face. It's not even committed enough to laugh at me.

I've also been told that I have this amazing talent for writing, and though I've seen it for myself, I sometimes can't help but think I'm being lied to. If it was there, I should have already written reams upon reams of poetry, fiction and essays. But I haven't. The ideas are there, rattling in my head, fresh as the day they cropped up, but they're stuck there. They want desperately to be put to paper, even if it's digital, but they can't get out. I want them to come out perfect, but that's not going to happen unless they come out. Even this rant is having a hard time finding its way onto the screen and it's not even fiction!

I want to write, but I can't. I tell myself I will when I have time, but I already have it! I sit on my couch with the TV on and Facebook open, hoping people read what I post and comment on or even Like it. I post song lyrics and YouTube videos in vain attempts to grab somebody's attention, forgetting how well it went the last time. I'll post those, but I won't post how miserable, lonely and disappointed in my life I am because I think it's a petty grab at attention towards my too small audience.

I hate my life at the moment. I say 'at the moment' because I can't see (or stand to bear for that matter) how this life could last into my 30's, 40's and beyond. Yes, I'm in school, but not the one I want to be in. I still live at home, and though I'm surrounded by all my possessions, it all seems so meaningless. I hate my job that I can't quit and something else I deleted though it's no secret what it was I'm sure. I'm scared because I have no idea what I'm supposed to do next, but I refuse to accept help because that's what weak people do. I'm a walking Catch-22 if ever there were one. I'm only happy when I'm miserable, but I'm always miserable so why aren't I happy?

I just wanted to write about how much I loved The Social Network. I wanted to say that Mark isn't an asshole. He's awkward, smart and a good guy, but damn if the good guy part doesn't get lost in the shuffle. I know what it's like to not fit in when by all accounts you should, and to then go about being alone with a stiff upper lip. It sucks. It's soul crushing work that goes unrewarded as long as it goes.

The film ends with Mark tapping F5 intermittently, silently waiting for the reason he's there to respond to his friend request. This blog entry ends with me posting a link to Facebook, warning people not to read it for how dreary and depressing it is. Then I'll be going to sleep. When I wake up I'll wring whatever joy I can from those few fleeting seconds where I can't remember what drove me to write all of this in the first place.

Good night.